I am a film buff. I say "film" rather than "movie" because my taste can be a bit esoteric. My favorite films have exactly the kinds of properties that most people hate in a movie: unsavory or enigmatic characters, ambiguous plots, complex ideas, slow development, long takes. I am a connoiseur of film style too, as long as the style enhances the story rather than being stylish for its own sake.
| Our Film Collection |
Below you will find a list of the films we have in our collection at home, with comments and reviews of most of them. Our collection includes DVDs, laserdiscs, and videotapes. We started collecting laserdiscs many years ago, when commentary tracks and special editions were new and reserved for films that deserved the treatment. Now such "extras" are a standard feature of most DVDs, added to sell discs. Regrettably, most extras are a waste of time.
I have never been a fan of Jim Carrey. Since his days on the TV show In Living Color, he has struck me as one of those guys who compensates for being unpopular by going all-out in performance. A drama geek, or rather, a comedy geek. I find it kind of uncomfortable and sad instead of hilarious. This film is a perfect example of his talent.
...Oh, did I mention that this one is Evelyn's?
This movie is based on a book by Jim Thompson, the pulp novelist who wrote The Killer Inside Me and The Grifters. It tells the story of three lowlife characters who work out a plan to kidnap a rich kid: Jason Patric is a punch-drunk boxer fresh out of a mental institution, Rachel Ward is a lonely woman living on an abandoned date farm, and Bruce Dern is the local character with big ideas. Trouble is, none of the conspirators trusts the others.
There’s nothing particularly special about the plot, but the movie has a mood that really hooks me. I can’t pinpoint exactly what gives it the mood, although it’s partly the acting and the naturalistic set design. Jason Patric does an excellent job of portraying a guy who may not be as dumb as he seems, Rachel Ward doesn’t overplay the femme fatale role, and Bruce Dern is his usual creepy self.
The movie was directed by James Foley, who also made At Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross. I’m tempted to say he’s an underrated director, but he has directed a lot of crap, like Madonna’s Who’s That Girl?.
A comedy by Martin Scorsese? Why not! He made a musical (New York, New York).
I really like this movie for a few reasons. First, the situation and the way Griffin Dunne reacts to it seems realistic to me. He truly seems like a normal guy reacting to the outlandish problems he faces. But of course his reactions just lead to more problems. Second, there’s something about it that makes it really feel like it’s late at night.
Lastly, I like how various images and themes recur. For example, early on Griffin talks about his fear of being burned; later, he finds burn medication in Roseanna Arquette's room; and later still Catherine O’Hara insists on burning a piece of paper plastered to his arm. This leitmotif (if I may use a fancy literary term) has nothing to do with the story, but it combines with a bunch of others like it to make the story seem more structured than it really is. (To return to the literary realm, I remember a class I took in literary criticism. We read David Copperfield, and in one of the early chapters the professor pointed out that David's stepfather was always described in terms of his hands. Why? No reason, but the repetition helped to knit the scene together.)
The first collaboration between mad German film director Werner Herzog and mad film actor Klaus Kinski, Aguirre, the Wrath of God tells the story of a Spanish expedition to find the legendary El Dorado. Like all Herzog films, Aguirre has indelible images that overcome stilted acting from all but the maniacal Kinski. It starts with a vivid panorama of the Spaniards slogging their way through the jungle, wearing their finery and carrying sedan chairs while sinking to their knees in the mud. They send an advance party drifting down a raging river in flimsy looking rafts. As they plunge deeper into the jungle, Aguirre becomes increasingly power-mad, eventually declaring independence from Spain and killing those who oppose him. ("That man is a head taller than me. That may change.") His sense of grandeur grows as the expedition falls apart, leading to a memorable final image: Aguirre, alone on the raft that has been overrun by monkeys, proclaiming the beginning of his ideal empire.
This film would make a good double-feature with Apocalypse Now, which is another river-based film filled with fantastic images, or with other Herzog-Kinski collaborations such as Nosferatu or Fitzcarraldo.
A truly classic comedy, the first and best of its kind. The key to its success is the actors: rather than being comedians, most of them are the brand of over-serious actor who starred in the types of movies being lampooned. Their dead-pan delivery offsets the silliness of the jokes... well, except for the hilarious guy in the airport control room.
This deluxe box set of DVDs provides more information than you could ever want about the Alien series. It contains NINE discs: two discs for each of the four films (the film on one, extras on another) and a final disc with even more extra features. It is so big they had to make up a new word (quadrilogy) instead of using the existing word for a series of four (tetralogy). Depending on your point of view, it either sets a new standard for the DVD treatment of classic films or serves as an example of the overkill that is all too common in the DVD market today. I lean toward the latter: only the first two films are good enough and influential enough to deserve the special edition treatment, and even for them few of the extra features enhance our appreciation of the films.
About the individual films:
Alien was a very influential horror movie — and I do mean horror rather than science fiction, since it’s essential a monster movie. Before Alien, movie space ships always had the slick, futuristic chic look of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Nostromo in Alien is a working man’s space ship: dark, messy, and full of oil and steam. The crew is equally blue collar; they’re shown with their hair uncombed, griping about their pay and the amount of work they have to do. It immediately seems realistic — of course this is what a real interstellar oil rig would look like. The director, Ridley Scott, is a master at creating mood and atmosphere: his other foray into science fiction was Blade Runner.
Where Alien is a horror movie, Aliens is an action movie. Evelyn likes Aliens because of the strength of Sigourney Weaver’s character. The original theatrical release showed how good an action director James Cameron can be. (He directed the first two Terminator movies.) This DVD set also includes Cameron's extended director's cut of Aliens, which shows how he can be his own worst enemy when studio constraints are lifted. The "director's cut" is more than a half hour longer, has a slower pace, and the new scenes don't add much depth. (Ridley Scott's director's cut of Alien, by contrast, is actually shorter than the original release. His essay about the cut in the liner notes for this set is interesting and revealing.)
Although I can't claim that Alien 3 is a great film, I do appreciate it more than its terrible reputation would suggest I should. I think the filmmakers made a conscious decision to subvert as many audience expectations as possible. Beautiful woman in the lead role? Let's shave her head. Cute kid to bring in the family audience? Kill her off. Happy ending setting up the next sequel? Screw that, let's put the series to bed. Now, Sigourney Weaver and the director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) should have known that it's not that easy to kill a money-making franchise like the Alien pictures. In the first sequel to Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston blows up the entire planet, but they still managed three more sequels and a TV series.
Alien: Resurrection I can make no excuses for. Despite another strong director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who made The City of Lost Children), it sucks as it works overtime to reintroduce all of the traditional elements of an ongoing movie series.
All That Jazz was the movie Evelyn and I saw on our first date. But that's not why Evelyn cites it as her favorite film. It is an underrated and forgotten classic. The music and dance numbers are extremely memorable and well put together — as well as being integral to the flow of the film unlike in most musicals. Fosse manages to weave together the many strands of the story, including fantasy sequences, without confusing us or making it seem like an art film. We also get to see how a Broadway musical is put together. Just great (although the last half hour could use some tightening up).
All the President's Men is remarkable for being an exciting film in which most of the "action" takes place during telephone calls.
Andrei Rublev was the second film by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s exactly the kind of film people who say they hate foreign films can’t stand: three and a half hours long, subtitled, black and white, concerning a historical figure no one knows anything about, and addressing big philosophical themes like the role of the artist in society. However, some critics consider it one of the 20 best films ever made.
Andrei Rublev was a medieval Russian painter. Like all artists of his time, he painted religious art. The film tells the story of his crisis of faith, which makes him stop painting for many years. The film has eight sections, each of covers one incident in Rublev’s life.
Tarkovsky has some stylistic tricks that make parts of this film hard to follow, but the cinematography is always impressive. The last section speaks to me. Titled The Bell, it concerns a young boy whose bellmaker father has died from the plague. He tells some royal messengers that his father told him the secret to bell-making on his death bed and convinces them to put him in charge of casting a huge bell. I love this section for its psychological and spiritual dimensions as well as for how it shows the mechanics of casting a bell.
For those of you who know Tarkovsky’s work, I’ll tell you that this Criterion Collection disc is the 3 hour 20 minute version also known as The Passion According to Andrei. It contains about 15 minutes of footage cut from most theatrical prints of the film. Most of the footage comes from the bloody sack of Vladimir.
My favorite Tarkovsky film remains Stalker.
The classic Woody Allen film, the one where he perfectly balanced comedy and heart.
I used to say that Apocalypse Now was a collection of truly great scenes that didn’t really add up into a great movie. Now that I’ve watched it several times, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the overall film.
This disc is my demonstration disc. The picture and sound quality are awesome. (I hear the new Dolby Digital disc is even better, but I’m happy with what I’ve got here.)
I also have Hearts of Darkness on laserdisc, which almost makes up for the fact that this disc doesn’t have any commentary or extras.
I have seen the expanded version, Apocalypse Now Redux, but I prefer the original version. (See Aliens and Dawn of the Dead for my comments on other "director's cuts" that fall short of the original release.) It's nice to see some of the scenes that Hearts of Darkness talks about, but they drag the tempo of the film.
The Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray consists of three films made in India during the 1950s: Pancher Panchali (“Song of the Little Road”), Aparajito (“The Unvanquished”), and The World of Apu. They are the best known Indian films ever made. They were almost revolutionary in their time for their carefully observed presentation of everyday Indian life and for being in the Bengali language. No campy musical numbers here.
The three films follow the life of a single family. Pancher Panchali shows their life as they struggle to survive in a small town. In Aparajito they move to the city and the son Apu distinguishes himself at school. The World of Apu follows the adult Apu. All three films provide an interesting look at Indian life. I think I liked Aparajito the best, because of the tender relationship between Apu and his mother.
This movie has an interesting contrast between stylized direction (tracking shots, slow motion, cutting to the music) and realistic method acting from Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. It shouldn’t work, but it does. The visual style and the haunting musical score (variations on Madonna’s “Live To Tell”) add a dreaminess that takes just enough edge off of the explosive subject matter.
The story takes place in the Midwest. Christopher Walken is the head of the local theft ring. His two sons (Sean Penn and Chris Penn) get involved with the gang. But Sean falls for Mary Stuart Masterson and starts challenging his father’s authority. The father and son have increasingly violent confrontations, until they are trying to kill each other.
As in After Dark, My Sweet, director James Foley is able to create a distinctive mood of melancholy.
This uneven comedy has some classic bits in it, but many of its scenes go on too long (prime example: the penis pump jokes). There’s a great half-hour to hour long film in this 90-minute movie. The character of Austin Powers is inspired, and some of his catchphrases have caught on in the real world.
Believe it or not, the disc is a special edition, with a commentary track from Mike Myers and the film’s director. Their discussion is fun even if it doesn’t really add anything to the movie. The disc also has some deleted scenes (yes, they actually did delete some), all of which were removed for good reason.
As one reviewer said, “The Citizen Kane of talking pig movies.” Babe tells the story of a little pig who learns the fate of his fellow pigs and decides to learn a useful skill to avoid the slaughterhouse. He herds sheep.
My favorite supporting character is the duck who acts like a chicken. He has an especially funny scene in which he asks Babe to go in the farmer’s house to steal the alarm clock. The expression on his face when he can’t warn Babe about the stuff tangled around his feet is priceless.
Badlands is a lyrical film about a serial killer and his girlfriend. (Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?) It stars two then-unknowns, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Although it wasn't a blockbuster, it was quite influential with its unique take on the crime genre. You can see its influence, for example, all over At Close Range.
Badlands was the debut film of Terence Malick. Malick was one of the promising young filmmakers of the early 1970s, along with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Coppola. In some circles he was considered the most talented of the bunch. He made Badlands and Days of Heaven, two highly regarded poetic films, then retired into obscurity much like J.D. Salinger. He didn't make another film until over 20 years later: The Thin Red Line was greatly anticipated by cinema buffs, and the chance to work with Malick attracted a Who's Who of actors to the project.
Most people consider Barry Lyndon to be Stanley Kubrick's weakest film. Perhaps so — the story certainly moves slowly and Ryan O'Neal's performance is (perhaps intentionally) flat — but I'll take Stanley Kubrick's weakest film over most other people's best film any day.
The story takes place in eighteen century Europe. Barry Lyndon is a low-bred scoundrel who schemes and sleeps his way into wealth, then squanders the fortune.
To me, Barry Lyndon is primarily a visual film. Kubrick sets every shot as if it is a painting, and the actors move slowly through them in perfect time with the classical music. The effect allows us to focus on the entire setting. Kubrick the perfectionist did a lot of research to make the costumes and sets authentic. He even invented a new type of camera so that he could shoot interior scenes entirely in candlelight. The effect is gorgeous and mesmerizing as we watch the candles flicker.
Back when laserdiscs were a specialty item for film and equipment geeks, I used to visit the Internet laserdisc newgroup for reviews of the latest releases. I was often frustrated by the fact that most of the reviewers reserved their highest praise for the discs that showed off their system best, usually mindless action films with great special effects. I wasn't interested in buying discs simply to show off technical features; that's too geeky for me.
Well, this disc is an exception. I am a fan of the Beastie Boys, but I bought the DVD because it is the first and only disc I know of (outside of porn films) that uses the alternate angles option. You know how music videos are typically composed of alternating shots from three or four different locations? With this DVD, you can create your own version of the Beastie Boys video by selecting when to shift from one location to another. It's kinda cool.
This is the Jean Cocteau version from 1947, not the Disney animated version. Cocteau was a poet, and he was able to translate his lyricism to film. He creates a dreaminess using primitive special effects that is amazing. I love the atmosphere.
The disc includes commentary on the making of the film, as well as the Phillip Glass opera as an alternate soundtrack.
I read the book by Jerzy Kozinski before seeing the movie, which may explain why I don't like the movie as much as Evelyn does. The premise is that everyone misunderstands Chance's statements about gardening as insightful metaphors, a joke that I found easier to believe on the page than I do watching (the admittedly great) Peter Sellers deliver them. However, the film has a subdued high-class tone that befits a political drama more than a comedy, which makes the satire sharper.
Billy Jack is a fascinating time capsule from the early 1970s. It is so incredibly earnest about its hippie ideals, while at the same time delivering a drive-in movie. Watching it, I can't help but admire everyone's dedication while simultaneously laughing at the naivete and wooden acting.
"I try, I really try... but when I see this girl of such a beautiful spirit suffer this indignity... I just go BERSERK!"
Bjork is sui generis as a musician and artist. She sells a lot of records, but you don't hear many of her songs on the radio or see her videos on MTV. Her approach to videos is as creative and unusual as her approach to music. This collection of videos was released after her album Post.
David Lynch is a director with a distinctive personal style that can take some getting used to. The stories, the acting, and the direction are not quite naturalistic, and naturalism is the style we are most used to in films today. In Lynch films, the situations tend to slightly more melodramatic than reality, and the actors deliver their lines more slowly and portentiously. Once you are on Lynch's wavelength, however, nobody captures the logic of the subconscious better.
Blue Velvet is most known for Dennis Hopper's incredible performance as Frank Booth and for its disturbing sex scenes. (Roger Ebert still has not forgiven Lynch for what he sees as his exploitation of Isabella Rossellini.) However, I think the scene that best illustrates the mystery of Lynch's style is when Laura Dern tells about her dream of the robins. The dream shows the naive optimism of Dern's character, and it contrasts sharply with the darkness of the situation. It sounds rather silly, in fact, but somehow Lynch manages to make it clear that he shares her optimism and considers it a strength. When a robin appears at the end of the film, it is clearly fake, suggesting again that it is silly to believe in happy endings when reality is so dark.
Another motif of the film is how little separates the "good" character Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLachlan) from the evil Frank Booth. Combining these two motifs makes me conclude that the theme of Blue Velvet is that goodness is fragile and may seem silly, but naively clinging to it is our only hope.
I had heard an awful lot about this boxed set, so I bought it when laserdiscs went on sale in the face of DVD. It’s the kind of special edition that Criterion is best known for.
Brazil is something like a comedy version of 1984. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Price) is a low-level clerk in an extremely bureaucratic society who has heroic dreams in which he saves a woman. One day he sees the woman from his dreams at the Ministry where he works, and his pursuit of her gets him involved with terrorists trying to undermine the social order.
Brazil is most famous for the look of its production design and for the controversy that surrounded its initial release in the United States. Like Blade Runner, the atmosphere of Brazil was more influential than its story.
After Terry Gilliam made Brazil, Universal refused to release the two and a half hour film in the United States without cuts and changes that Gilliam refused to make. Most significantly, they wanted to change the ending, which they saw as too negative. (Personally, I think you can see the original ending as a happy one, with imagination triumphing over the system.) Unlike what usually happens when a filmmaker clashes with a studio, Gilliam was able to win the battle and get the movie released his way. This box set includes the full movie, a documentary about The Battle for Brazil, and the 90-minute “happy ending” version made by the studio. It also has the usual director’s commentary and a scene-by-scene analysis of the shorter version.
The best thing about this film is the incredible acting of Emily Watson. She plays Bess, a somewhat simple-minded woman in northern Scotland who believes she has a direct line to God. When she asks God to bring her husband home to her from the oil rig where he works, her husband has an accident and comes home paralyzed. This turn of events reinforces Bess’ belief that she can talk to God, and she sets out on a disasterous course trying to save her husband.
This film was directed by Lars von Trier, the Danish director who also made The Kingdom and Zentropa. He is a great stylist.
The laserdisc includes some deleted scenes, none of which add anything to the film, and in some cases would have detracted from it. More and more discs are including deleted scenes, but do they ever add anything to our appreciation of the film? I can only think of two cases where they are interesting: This is Spinal Tap and Reanimator.
I love this film for the relaxed way Jean Paul Belmondo cruises through it. When he needs some money, he casually saunters into the men’s room, off-handedly steals a guy’s wallet, and comes back to his girlfriend. His death scene is great: when they turn him over, he expels the smoke from his cigarette. This one stands the test of time.
This documentary is about the making of the Buena Vista Social Club album. The American musician Ry Cooder went to Cuba, tracked down a number of musicians from Cuban music's pre-war golden age, and recorded a series of albums with them. The film was made by Win Wenders, a respected German director. It captures the mood of Havana today as well as the wistfulness of the older musicians who suddenly find themselves playing again.
This two-DVD set contains a number of short films from the most famous and influential avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage. Rarely are the films more than 10 minutes long. Where most filmmakers are like short story writers or novelists, looking to tell a narrative, Brakhage is more like a poet, creating visual effects for their own sake. In fact, most of his films are silent because he felt that sound distracted from the visual experience.
Brakhage is best known for his painted films: rather than exposing the film in the traditional way, but painted directly onto it. The results are like projected abstract expressionist paintings. And like abstract expressionist paintings, some of them are quite beautiful while others leave you cold.
The collection also includes a few of his longer works. His epic Dog Star Man is the longest at about an hour, and unfortunately I don't care for it. There is also a half-hour film consisting entirely of graphic autopsy footage. The film got me thinking about what constitutes our life force, but it disturbed Evelyn so much that she refuses to watch any of the other films.
My favorite films are Commingled Containers, which is one of his later abstract works based (I think) around water images, and Window Water Baby Moving, his famous film showing the birth of his first child. He does not take a documentary-style approach at all. The film contains many beautiful images, not in sequence. Somehow it all adds up to an emotionally moving tribute.
A women miraculously survives a car crash into a river. But she starts seeing a ghostly image reflected in windows, and occasionally she loses contact with the world—suddenly no one can see or hear her, and she can’t hear anything.
This low-budget classic is exceedingly creepy despite (or maybe because of) its cheap effects. The surprise ending isn’t as surprising as I’m sure it was when it came out, but it works anyway.
Do I need to say anything about Casablanca? It’s been called the greatest film produced under the old studio system.
My personal favorite line is Bogart’s answer to Peter Lorre early in the film:
Lorrie: “You despise me don’t you, Rick?”
Bogart: “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”
The commentary, from film historian Ronald Haver, is interesting. It gives a good idea of how movies were made during the studio era. I was interested in the struggles they had with the script (and just the subject matter). One interesting tidbit: there’s a scene inside the airport hanger where you can see the plane in the distance. They didn’t have a big stage, so they used a small plane and hired midgets to play the attendants.
A Charlie Brown Christmas never fails to take me back to my childhood. I can’t imagine a Christmas special made today with such a melancholy mood, or with so explicit an anti-commercial (and religious) message.
For me, the centerpiece of the show is Charlie’s visit to the Christmas tree lot. It starts with a long shot of the lot from a distance, with the flashy lights against the dark night sky. Then he’s at the lot, amid the hustle and bustle. There’s something about that transition from the quiet darkness to the noisy light that captures my feelings about the holiday season.
The music by Vince Guaraldi is a vital part of the mix, of course. The Charlie Brown Christmas CD is my absolute favorite seasonal disc, and the only one I play outside of December.
Some parts of this family comedy strain too hard to be heartwarming, but the scene where Ralphie goes to visit the department store Santa is a classic.
This film was made in Hong Kong in 1996, but it feels like a French New Wave film from the 1960s. It has an insouciance about it that I love. I also like the small details that give me a feel of what Hong Kong is like, like the Circle K store and people speaking Cantonese but listening to American pop music. I couldn’t get “California Dreaming” out of my head for days after seeing this movie. It would make a good double feature with Breathless.
Citizen Kane is considered by some critics to be the best film ever made. I think that’s overstating it. It’s a good film with a satifyingly complex central character, but it doesn’t grab me emotionally like a truly great film does.
It’s most famous for the technical innovations introduced by the cinematographer, Gregg Toland, and they do still impress even though they’ve been copied a million times by now. One of my favorite shots comes during the public debut of Kane’s wife as an opera singer. As she sings, the camera pans up and up and up into the rafters, coming to rest on two workers on a scaffold. One turns to the other and pinches his nose. That’s how the movie lets you know her singing stinks.
Storywise, my favorite scene comes just after Kane loses the election for governor. Kane’s friend Leland (played by my favorite actor of the period, Joseph Cotton) talks about how Kane was all for helping the working man as long as everyone saw his help as generosity, but wasn’t so happy when the working man demanded the same things as his right. The scene makes me think: there’s an interesting idea here about noblesse oblige and the sources of liberal ideals.
City Lights is Charlie Chaplin’s greatest film, because it finds just the right balance between slapstick comedy and heartfelt sentimentality.
I think whether people like A Clockwork Orange or not depends on whether they are able to sympathize with Alex: if they are able to, they like it; if they’re not able to, they don’t. I’m able to.
This film is a perfect example of one where you’re asked to identify with a character you don’t like at all. I love movies like that. It’s almost like a moral exercise, putting yourself in the place of a person with a different value system.
I first saw Dawn of the Dead at the drive-in theater in Dublin with some friends from high school. They were big fans of Night of the Living Dead, which I hadn’t seen. They were very disappointed with Dawn of the Dead because it wasn’t as scary as Night of the Living Dead, but I loved it. It is really more an action movie than a horror movie, and it was my first exposure to a movie that mixed horror and humor. I loved the whole idea of the movie, of taking over a shopping mall. I saw the social commentary at the same time as I felt the thrill of taking over the mall.
We have this film on videotape and laserdisc. The disc is labeled “The Director’s Cut,” but according to Video Watchdog magazine, it’s more appropriate to call it the Cannes Film Festival cut. The VHS version, which was the version released in the United States, is shorter and has different music in some places. I prefer the shorter cut, and I think the director George Romero does too. It’s tighter and has better transitions.
Day of the Dead is the underrated final chapter of George Romero’s zombie trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead). A military group shares an underground bunker with a group of scientists. The scientists want to find a cure for the zombies or learn to control them; the soldiers just want to wipe the zombies out. They argue incessantly about the correct course of action, especially since the lead scientist appears to be going crazy.
People were disappointed by Day of the Dead because it didn’t build on the pure horror of Night of the Living Dead, or on the gore and humor of Dawn of the Dead. However, I think it’s the most realistic of the films. The non-stop arguments can get tiring, but it effectively conveys the desperate situation they are in.
The Decalogue is a ten-part series that ran on Polish television in the late 1980s. Each episode tells a story that relates to one of the Ten Commandments. They were written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, who later made the series of films Red, White, and Blue. If you have seen any of his films, you know that he approaches subjects obliquely. None of the episodes in The Decalogue illustrates the corresponding commandment in a simple, straightforward way. Instead, each episode tells a compelling story that happens to raise moral issues.
As an example, in one episode a woman comes to ask her husband's doctor whether her husband will live. (He is in a coma). The doctor declines to answer, since he can't know for sure, but the woman insists. She is carrying another man's baby. If her husband is going to live, she will abort the baby; if her husband dies, she will keep it. Suddenly the doctor's answer takes on another dimension.
All of the episodes take place in an apartment complex in Warsaw, and they rarely end up where you think they are headed. If you have a tolerance for European art film conventions (long silences, slow-developing plots, and more dialogue than action), these short films are rewarding. The Decalogue is up there with Twin Peaks and The Kingdom among the most cinematic work to appear on television. All three are examples where well-known film directors tried their hand at the small screen.
This early film by John Waters displays all of the tastelessness he is known for, but is not as good as Pink Flamingos or Polyester.
The first time I saw Dr Strangelove, I didn’t get it. That is, I didn’t find it funny. I don’t remember how old I was, but maybe I was too young or something. Anyway, it was only when I saw it again years later that I learned to appreciate it. Now I consider it one of the deepest satires ever.
One aspect of the film that I find interesting is how static the shots are. Kubrick sometimes doesn’t even stray from the master shot (or at least it seems that way). The lighting is very odd, too.
Don’t Look Back is a documentary of Bob Dylan’s tour of England the year before he went electric. It’s not a concert film; in fact, you don’t see any performance footage. Instead, the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker follows Dylan backstage, during interviews, and in his hotel room.
In a sense, this film is about the whirlwind around Dylan rather than Dylan himself. Everyone seems to offer an opinion about what Dylan means except for Dylan himself. He refuses to give a straight answer to any question about his lyrics or his intentions, and he even challenges interviewers when they try to pin him down. It seems like a textbook example of how art (and the artist) cannot and will not explain itself, but we all feel compelled to assign a meaning to it.
Don’t Look Back also includes the famous Dylan music video for “Positively 4th Street,” with Dylan standing in an alley holding (and dropping) cue cards.
I prefer this second film by Jim Jarmusch to his first, Stranger Than Paradise. It looks great, has a real mood, and features fun performances from Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni. And it is quite funny, in a downbeat way.
The story concerns three small-time guys (John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Roberto Benigni) who end up in a prison together in Louisiana. Eventually they escape into the bayous. That's it for plot. The fun comes from the interactions among the very different characters.
The DVD we have is actually a version of Drunken Master II, renamed for its American release. The original Drunken Master was one of Jackie Chan's early breakthrough roles, long before he became popular in the United States. Drunken Master II was made many years later. It features Jackie Chan's patented stunts and winning personality. This film is one of the best, along with Police Story II, released in the United States as Supercop.
What I appreciate most about Jackie Chan is that the stunts are always life-size. In most Hollywood movies, the action sequences are huge and outlandish, and the stunts feel like cartoons. In Chan films, the stunts feel more real because they seem like they could happen. Chan's insistence on performing his own stunts is the major factor in this realism.
Early Summer was the first Yasujiro Ozu film I saw, and it remains my favorite one after seeing several others. Like most Ozu films, it concerns a family's efforts to marry off a daughter. (If you like Jane Austen, you may like Ozu.) What I like about this variation is that it takes its time developing the day-to-day lives of its many characters before starting in on the plot. I also find Sestsuko Hara's character to be more complete and more likeable than in Late Spring or Tokyo Story.
The commentary tracks on the Criterion Ozu discs are uniformly excellent. They talk about the Ozu style and how it enhances the films rather than just the usual production trivia.
Evelyn’s favorite film. This story of four women who rent a villa in Italy to temporarily escape their lives in London does an excellent job of portraying relaxation, which is hard to dramatize if you think about it.
The transition scene that typifies the effect of the movie is when our two heroines arrive in Italy. They arrive at a lonely train station at night in the rain. They are obviously frightened. A man runs up an grabs their bags. They think they’re being robbed, but then realize it’s someone from the villa. They endure a frightening ride to the villa. The next scene shows them waking up and throwing open the shutters to a beautiful, peaceful garden overlooking the sea. The feeling of relief is immediate.
This is the kind of movie I would expect to find insipid, but it’s not at all. All of the actors do a great job of taking their characters beyond stereotypes.
I was waiting for this film to come out in a special edition. It was rereleased to theaters with a remastered soundtrack in the halcyon days when David Lynch was the toast of the town courtesy of Twin Peaks. But before a laserdisc came out, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me did, and suddenly no one was interested in David Lynch. So I broke down and bought the only version available: a Japanese import. Adding to the uniquely strange atmosphere, I get Japanese subtitles.
When the film finally became available (in 2003 from davidlynch.com only), I snatched it up immediately. In addition to the film, the DVD has a typically rambling reminiscence from David Lynch.
The first time I saw this film, I found its plot completely incomprehensible but loved its creepiness and attention to visual and aural textures. In fact, I believed that Lynch’s intention might have been to confuse the plot so we’d focus on those elements, much as modern artists try to get us to really see by eschewing realistic representations. The second time I saw it (when I convinced my brother to rent it), the plot made almost perfect sense: it’s about the fear of parenthood. By now, the film seems much less strange than it did originally but it’s still a classic film with the power to haunt you. The baby is a testament to the great special effects you can produce on a tight budget.
Evelyn and I still quote a line from this film: “Oh, you are sick!”
A classic of horror comedy, with the emphasis on comedy. It’s over the top in its nonstop action, gore, and gags. My favorite line comes after the hero’s hand is taken over by evil spirits and he fights against it furiously. He plunges a huge knife into his hand and says triumphantly, “Who’s laughing now?” He just plunged a knife into his own hand! I don’t know, I just find that funny.
The laserdisc includes fun commentary from the director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell, plus behind-the-scenes footage.
Everyone knows that The Exorcist is one of the best horror films ever. We have the original version on DVD, not the "special" version that was released in honor of the film's 25th anniversary. I have heard that the new version is not so special, and I am generally against making retrospective changes to classic films just to sell a few more copies of the DVD.
This film came out in the same year as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Many managers took their teams out to see The Phantom Menace during its first week. Film snob that I am, I took my team instead to see Stanley Kubrick's final film.
I was one of the few people who really liked Eyes Wide Shut. Most people were disappointed that it didn't have more sex between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; other complained that New York City looked fake and that the orgy sequence went on for too long. While I agree with this last criticism (about the length of the orgy sequence), I think the film is very interesting and insightful look at the difficulties of remaining faithful in a marriage. Given the prominent role of dreams in the plot, I had no problem with the less-than-realistic set design. I found the film mesmerizing.
Fallen Angels is another of those films I was able to buy here in Pleasanton, but couldn't find for rent. I received it as a stocking stuffer for Christmas. It is something of a companion piece to Chungking Express: one of the two stories in Fallen Angels was originally conceived as an additional story for Chungking Express. The tone and style is very similar to Chungking Express, but it doesn't grab me as much.
This John Huston film from 1972 provides a realistic portrayal of life on the margins. It tells the story of two amateur boxers in Stockton, although it is more about their lives and expectations than about boxing. The locations in the poor areas of Stockton are very natural, as are the acting and the writing. Susan Tyrell is especially impressive as a barfly who hooks up with Stacy Keach; she got an Academy Award nomination for the role.
I am sure that most people would find Fat City depressing and boring. However, nearly all of the characters have hope for the future and compensations in the present. The rewards of this film are subtle. I love the scenes with the always upbeat boxing promoter, played by Nicholas Colasanto (who also appears in Raging Bull!). The final fight removes all glamour from the sport of boxing. The final scene of the film seals it for me though: the two main characters, whose sad lives we have just witnessed, talk about how they wouldn't want to be the guy who serves them coffee.
The crazy German director Werner Herzog says that he doesn't recognize a distinction between documentaries and fiction features. Fata Morgana consists of footage that Herzog shot in Africa, then assembled into an unclassifiable film. His trademark eye for haunting images in securely in place, and in fact that's all this film consists of. The DVD came as a companion to the later, similar, better film Lessons of Darkness. On both DVDs, Herzog provides his typically wacky audio commentary.
Fearless is the story of two people who survive a plane crash. Jeff Bridges is an architect who comes away from the accident feeling invulnerable; Rosie Perez can't recover from the loss of her two-year old baby. A psychiatrist hired by the airlines (John Tuturro) brings them together and they form a bond.
I love the way this film combines a deeply emotional subject with a smooth, detached surface. It's all summed up in Jeff Bridge's great performance: on the one hand, he has a new love of life, but on the other he feels removed from his everyday activities and even his wife.
Fearless was directed by Peter Weir, who also made Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, and The Truman Show. He has a tolerance for unexplained mystery that serves this story well. He doesn't feel the need to explain every aspect of Jeff Bridge's action.
42 Up is the latest installment of the utterly fascinating documentary series that checks in every seven years with a group of British people first interviewed as children. In the mid-1960s, the director Michael Apted interviewed a cross-section of seven-year-old British children about their hopes and expectations. The idea was to explore the extent to which their futures were determined by their place in the social hierarchy. Every seven years, Apted goes back and interviews the people who are still willing to participate. As of this film, they are 42 years old. Fascinating.
42 Up includes clips from all previous installments, so you can jump into the series without having seen the earlier ones.
Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film (filmed in its entirety in England). While it has a lot of good things in it, including an eclectic soundtrack, an offbeat performance from Matthew Modine, and some great put-downs from R. Lee Ermey, it is my least favorite of Kubrick's later films.
Gates of Heaven is ostensibly a documentary about pet cemeteries and how people react to the loss of their pets. But Errol Morris has a way of pointing a camera at people and letting them talk, not stopping them when they go off on tangents. They say some fascinating and revealing things long after they’ve answered Morris’ original question.
The main characters are a family who run a pet cemetery somewhere in the north Bay (Sonoma?). I am particularly fascinated by the older son. He used to be a salesman, but now he has come back to help run the family business. He says several times that he’s “not at all” bothered by taking orders from his younger brother, who knows more about the business. At one point, he tells a story about when he was a sales manager: if a young salesman was struggling, he’d bring him into the office and show him all his trophies, explaining how he won them. I’m fascinated by this story: how is this supposed to inspire the young salesman?
Gates of Heaven is one of my all-time favorite documentaries. I wish other filmmakers would pick up on Morris' style.
Watch this film along with Salesman to learn what it is like to be a salesman. This fictional story is more overheated than Salesman's documentary view, but both match my brief experience in the field.
This film features great performances from an all-star cast (Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin), but the real reason to see it is David Mamet's hard-boiled dialog. The pinnacle is Alec Baldwin's early scene as the emissary from the downtown office. Classic! I often quote his lines at work (in private situations where profanity is acceptable.)
Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations was the first CD I ever bought. It remains one of the best CDs for writing to. This DVD shows Gould playing the entire piece, as well as a short introductory interview. Spending an hour watching someone play the piano may sound dull, but the filmmaker (himself a musician) films each variation differently, providing visual interest. Gould himself is an interesting character to watch too.
On the subject of Glenn Gould, I also recommend Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
Almost every scene in this movie is memorable and influential. The best things about it, though, are the transformation of Michael Corleone from the innocent “good son” to the head of the family, the music, and the cinematography. My favorite part is the heart of Michael’s transformation: from his visit to the hospital through the killing of Scolozzi (sp?) and Captain McCloskey. The mood of the empty hospital is eerie. Then, I love the reaction of Sonny and Tom when Michael suggests that he kill Scolozzi and McCloskey, and the way they treat him as they send him off. But my absolute favorite moments come after Michael comes back from the bathroom with the gun and sits down. He’s not supposed to sit down, you wonder if he’s going to do it, and you can see him consider this irreversible step in his life. Great acting by Al Pacino, and Coppola is smart to leave the camera on his face even though others are talking.
The remastered laserdisc I have isn’t all that impressive. The picture looks a bit mushy, not sharp like most discs. The sound is okay, but there is still dialog I can’t make out very well. The extra interviews at the end are very short and not very illuminating.
The only sequel ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, this film is more sophisticated than the original. In some ways I like it more than the first one, although that may reflect snobbery on my part since it’s more intelligently (and complicatedly) plotted. It’s also more of an epic, with lots of locations and big scenes. I like Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth; he’s such a complex combination of menacing mobster and kindly grandfather.
The film switches between two stories that sandwich the action of the first movie: the story of Vito Corleone’s arrival in America (which was in the original book), and the story of Michael’s attempts to go legitimate. Francis Coppola later re-edited the movies into The Godfather Saga, which presented the story in chronological order. But I prefer The Godfather Part II as it is. I like how the two stories seem to reinforce each other: as Vito gains more power, Michael loses some; as Vito gets closer to his family, Michael drives them away. For example, we have the scene where Vito kills the local don and comes home to his family, then we see Michael come home to an empty, snowbound house.
My favorite scene comes near the end, when Kay comes to tell Michael she’s leaving him. It’s an intense scene. Michael goes through a range of emotions, and Pacino lets you see them all. I’m particularly impressed by the way he conveys Michael’s increasing frustration—with all his power, he can’t control his wife—until he finally lashes out and slaps her.
You know, Marlon Brando won the Best Actor Oscar for Godfather I and Robert DeNiro won it for Godfather II (two actors getting Oscars for playing the same character!). All I can say is that Al Pacino got ripped off both times. He gives the better performance in both films.
The Great Escape is a film that I loved as a kid. I particularly liked the cool Steve McQueen character (naturally) — the way he’d escape in order to get information, they get his glove tossed to him on his way to the cooler — and the trick about telling someone how good their German is. All the details about the escape plans where cool too.
As an adult, I find the movie a bit too Hollywoodish. But the cool stuff is still cool.
The disc has a commentary track that talks about the real story the movie is based on. It also has some footage from the actual prison camp.
Hard-Boiled is one of two all-time classic Hong Kong action flicks directed by John Woo and featuring Chow Yun Fat, one of the coolest and most charismatic actors around. (The Killer is the other.) As in all of Woo's movies, the melodrama and the violence are over the top.
This film is best known for the long scenes at the beginning and the end. The story starts with a shootout in a Chinese restaurant where the customers all bring their birds in cages. The finale has our hero saving babies from the maternity ward while a huge gun battle rages around him.
Hearts of Darkness is a great documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. It gives a fascinating glimpse into the creative process of Francis Coppola, who definitely put his all into the film.
High Plains Drifter is one of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies. It embodies all the elements I associate with “modern” (post-Leone) Westerns. The gunfighter “hero” isn’t much different from a villian, the “innocent” townfolk have a guilty secret, and the desire for peace and justice leads to violence and destruction.
High Plains Drifter shows the differences from traditional Westerns particularly clearly because the story is so close to The Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai: town hires gunfighter to protect it from bandits. In the traditional story, the protectors are noble warriors and the villagers are helpless and ignorant (in The Magnificent Seven anyway; in Seven Samurai the villagers did have a history of killing wayward samurai). Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name is exactly the kind of gunfighter the villagers were afraid of in the earlier films—the reason they hid their women.
This film was Clint Eastwood’s second as a director, following Play Misty for Me. One of its costars, Billy Curtis, was a frequent customer of Evelyn’s when she worked at the bank in Hollywood.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the scariest film I saw as a kid. The whole idea that you couldn’t know who to trust was horrifying.
When I was a little older, I heard that the movie was really an allegory about creeping communism. When I watched it again with this in mind, I found the movie kind of funny. Then, when I was in college, I had a course in literary criticism. The professor, Steven Booth, claimed that miscellaneous information you knew about a work of artbiographical information, for exampledid not alter your perception of the art itself, because the only (legitimate anyway) influences on your perception were in the art work itself. I argued with him based on my experience with this movie.
Quentin Tarantino's third film is his most mature. That's not to say that Jackie Brown is a better film than Pulp Fiction, but it does have greater emotional depth. The source of the depth is easy to identify: it comes from the performances of Robert Forster and Pam Grier, and the quiet relationship that develops between them.
This film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival is full of great visuals and great music. It makes no attempt to tell a story or make a point. It simply juxtaposes music from the performances with images of the bands, the crowd, and the Americas Cup race going on at the same time. The director was a photographer by trade and it shows. Beautiful.
The highlights for me are the credit sequence, which moves from the abstract to the concrete, and the performance by Anita O'Day.
Junebug tells a subtle story about our need for a feeling of belonging. It features a pitch-perfect portrayal of a small-town Southern family, but it is Amy Adams who makes it all work. Her performance as Ashley, the upbeat pregnant wife of the protagonist's brother-in-law, is a joy to behold. Her character ties together all the themes and provides a counterweight to the quiet fatalism of the rest of the family. Amy Adams deserved the Oscar she was nominated for. (She lost to Rachel Weisz from The Constant Gardener.)
My favorite Hong Kong action film, featuring the ever-cool Chow Yun Fat and directed by John Woo. The tag line for the movie is "One vicious hitman. One fierce cop. Ten thousand bullets." That about sums it up.
The story concerns a hit man (Chow Yun Fat) who accidentally blinds a woman during a job. He takes one final assignment in order to pay for surgery to repair her eyes. In the meantime, a cop (Tony Leung) is hunting him down. All of the John Woo trademarks are here: melodramatic situations, male bonding, guys sliding backwards while firing two guns, long stand-offs, and lots of shooting. It's a lot of fun if you have a tolerance for balletic violence.
The Killer would make a good double-feature with Hard-Boiled, which also stars Chow Yun Fat.
The Kingdom was originally broadcast as a miniseries on Danish television. It was directed by Lars Van Trier, who is best known in the United States for Breaking the Waves. It takes place in a large city hospital called The Kingdom. The Kingdom is the most technologically advanced hospital in Denmark, but it was built on a site where people used to come to commune with the supernatural. When strange things start to happen—a phantom ambulance pulls up every night, patients hear a girl crying in the elevator, zombies haunt the sleep laboratory, a pregnant doctor’s baby is growing amazingly fast—it appears that the hospital is becoming a battleground in the war between rationality and the supernatural.
The Kingdom has been compared to Twin Peaks. Both are television series supervised by well-known film directors, and both strive for a mix between offbeat characters, supernatural mystery, and comedy.
I particularly like the characters in The Kingdom: the administrator who is trying to implement a “happy workplace” program, the Swedish doctor who despises the Danes he is forced to work with, the know-it-all who starts to suspect his girlfriend is a ghost, and the researcher who has an infected kidney transplanted into his own body.
WARNING: The Kingdom ends with a cliffhanger. The Kingdom Part 2 played in theaters but has never been released on video or DVD. Part 2 has “a direct summoning of Satan,...Haitian zombie potions, Udo Kier as a monster baby, and the return of Ernst-Hugo Jaregard [as] the endlessly debased, Dane-hating doctor Stig Helmer.” It too ends with a cliffhanger, but unfortunately the actor Jaregard died before the third part could be made.
Don’t let the title mislead you into thinking this film is a comedy. It’s one of the many Martin Scorsese/Robert De Niro collaborations. De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a would-be stand-up comic obsessed with getting a shot on the Jerry Langdon show (modeled on The Tonight Show, with Jerry Lewis as Jerry Langdon). If he can just do his act on the show, he knows he’ll be the new King of Comedy, with Jerry Langdon as his best friend. Rupert tries everything he can to get Jerry’s attention, but he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Rupert Pupkin is a great character. He doesn’t have the same violent menace as other De Niro characters, but he’s just as relentless. The way he deliberately misunderstands when people brush him off can be agonizing to watch; you get embarrassed for him. But is he the loser he seems to be? Evelyn feels that the ending proves Rupert is really a winner.
Jerry Lewis also does an excellent job as Jerry Langdon, who isn’t really a nice man behind the public facade. Keep an eye out for members of The Clash during the scene where Jerry Langdon walks down the streets of New York.
Kiss Me Deadly is a film noirish detective film directed by Robert Aldrich, who also directed Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It stars Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, the detective from Mickey Spillane’s novel.
The mystery story is relatively routine and not all that interesting. What I like about this film is the great performance by Ralph Meeker. He plays Mike Hammer as a cocky bully. Unlike other movie detectives like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, Mike Hammer doesn’t have a personal code of ethics that guides his actions. He is just out for himself, and he doesn’t care who knows it. I love the way Meeker struts around with a sadistic smile on his face. As David Thomson says in the Nov/Dec 1997 issue of Film Comment, he is “cocksure, stupid, grating, sadistic, gleefully alert to the chance of advantage or bullying...,” particularly late in the movie when he starts slapping people around. The look on his face when he crushes the medical examiner’s hand says it all.
Kiss Me Deadly is also known as a possible source for the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The MacGuffin in Kiss Me Deadly is a heavy case with something glowing brightly inside it. Like Pulp Fiction, the movie never clarifies exactly what’s in the case.
This documentary came with the boxed set of Stanley Kubrick DVDs. It is a solid but unremarkable look at his life and work.
I saw this concert film featuring The Band when my brother Jim, my friend Kevin, and I went to see The Kids Are Alright, the movie about The Who. I had no idea who The Band was at the time, but I was hooked by the music and by the charisma of the band members, especially Robbie Robertson. When I later became a big fan of The Band, it expanded my appreciation for The Last Waltz.
The film was directed by Martin Scorsese, who got his start in the business as an editor on the film Woodstock. The DVD has a commentary by him as well as insightful comments about The Band's music from Greil Marcus, who devoted a chapter to The Band in his classic book about visions of America in popular music, Mystery Train.
I taped this film from cable because I wanted to see it again. I liked it even more the second time than I did the first. When we saw it in the theater, I noticed the great performances by Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue and was impressed by the unconventional approach to a love story. (In my view, Leaving Las Vegas is a story of how difficult it is to accept someone as they are.) The second time through, I paid attention to the atmosphere that director Mike Figgis creates through the cinematography and music. I know many people hate this film because it is depressing, but all of these other virtues carry the day for me.
This French film from 1967 has nothing to do with Japanese swordsmen except in attitude. It follows a hit man as he establishes his alibi, performs a job, and deals with the police investigation. The director, Jean-Pierre Melville, uses a minimalist style that I find hypnotic. The plot is simple, there is very little dialog, and the action consists mainly of watching Jef and the police do what they do. It is all style and tone; something about Alain Delon's performance as Jef makes it clear that Jef performs every action with a Buddhist-style prayerfulness.
Albert Brooks is the kind of comedian you either love or hate. I happen to love him. One of two classic Albert Brooks movies (Modern Romance being the other), Lost in America is the story of an upper-middle class couple that decides to drop out of the rat race and travel America in a motor home. When they find someplace they like—a lighthouse in Maine, perhaps—they’ll use their nest egg to make a new start. But they run into problems at their first stop, Las Vegas, where instead of getting remarried they learn about the wife’s gambling problem.
The scenes I love best are when Brooks tries to explain some scheme to a person who just doesn’t understand what he’s getting at. In Las Vegas, for instance, he tries to convince the casino manager to give him their money back. Brooks is in advertising, you see, and what great publicity it would be! The casino manager (played by Garry Marshall) just looks at him blankly and punctures the elaborate fantasy Brooks is spinning: then wouldn’t everybody want their money back? Later in the film, there’s a scene where Brooks is in a small-town employment office, and the clerk can’t get over how much money he used to make in advertising. Brooks can’t get him to realize that he’s not looking for a $50,000 a year job. It’s a patented Brooks persona: he’s smart and articulate, but it doesn’t do him any good. (This even applies to the role he played in Broadcast News, which he didn’t write.)
Like The Great Escape, the Magnificent Seven is one of my favorite Hollywood movies from when I was a kid. Steve McQueen again, and Charles Bronson too, but my favorite as a kid was James Coburn, the knife fighter. As an adult, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t use his knife skills more.
And as an adult, I’ve also seen the Seven Samurai. I think the Magnificent Seven is not as deep or important a film, but I think it stands up on its own merits. The DVD has a widescreen transfer, so that you can see all seven guys at once. Watching a full-screen version on TV, it would be more accurately titled The Magnificent Four and a Half.
It’s not as dark or morally ambiguous as other film noir movies (or as the book is), but The Maltese Falcon has the classic elements of the private eye genre: a convoluted plot, a dangerous woman who lies about what she’s after, and (most importantly) a detective whose personal moral code is more important than money or love. And what a cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook...
Trivia note: This film is actually the second one based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel. The first was made by Roy Del Ruth ten years before the John Huston version. Ricardo Cortez plays Sam Spade.
Some days I think Modern Romance is my all-time favorite comedy, courtesy of Albert Brooks. (On other days, my favorite is Young Frankenstein or This is Spinal Tap.) Modern Romance tells the story of a film editor (Brooks) who can’t stay with his girlfriend, but can’t leave her either. One classic scene after another. In addition to its jokes about relationships, there are several funny scenes about moviemaking too.
The other contender for Charlie Chaplin’s greatest film, after City Lights. I think City Lights is more accomplished, but Modern Times is more famous, particularly the scene with the machine that feeds Chaplin while he keeps working.
I’m not sure exactly what it is I find compelling about this film. Watching it relaxes me somehow.
I think the film is about how our lives are made up of elements we can control and those we can’t, and the different ways in which we try to take control. The scene that sits at the heart of it is the one where James Spader says everything was right with the universe until Mandy Patinkin stole the little figures of their hosts. Mandy confronts James with the little figures and asks him how they could have done it.
An idea movie if ever there was one. Two friends have a conversation over dinner. That’s it. It’s an interesting conversation, though. The part I remember best is the ethical discussion about whether to use an electric blanket when it’s cold.
I know William Burroughs fans hated this movie, because it has little to do with the book Naked Lunch. The story is a conglomeration of elements from many Burroughs stories, plus biographical details from his life. But I think the movie does a good job of conveying ideas through its hallucinatory images.
I think this film is about the creative process. The writers each have their favorite typewriter and feel sure they wouldn’t be able to create without it. The typewriters each excrete a particular drug, and the writers are addicted to those drugs. It’s hard for them to write with another writers’ typewriter.
If they had an entry in the dictionary for “over the top filmmaking,” they’d have a picture from Natural Born Killers next to it. Oliver Stone has never been a subtle director (at least since Salvador), and here he goes all out. This movie uses pretty much every cinematic trick in the book, some of them successfully and some of them not. Two sucessful scenes that leap to mind are the twisted sitcom version of Julliette Lewis’ childhood (featuring a despicable Rodney Dangerfield as dad) and the visit to the super drug store. The prison riot is less successful.
The plot summary for this film—television executives exploit a man having a nervous breakdown for the sake of ratings—makes it sound like it should be an over-the-top black comedy. And I suppose it is, but I love it because it is able to address several big ideas with the same story: the role of television in shaping public opinion, the exploitation of people’s problems as entertainment, the relationship between news and entertainment, the line between personal clarity and madness, and so on. The screenplay is full of smart, insightful writing, and it deservedly won the Oscar.
At the heart of the film is a heartbreaking performance by Peter Finch, who won the Best Actor Oscar posthumously. His character, Howard Beale, is having a personal crisis, a mental breakdown, and no one helps him. Instead, they argue about the ethics—and the risks vs rewards—of televising the breakdown. I am also impressed by the romantic subplot involving William Holden and Faye Dunaway. The emotions in it seem real. Finch and Dunaway won Oscars for their roles, but I think Holden’s portrayal of an aging man trying to find his place is at least equal to them, albeit less flashy.
Really an oddball movie, sui generis, a combination of a thriller and a sentimental drama. The tone starts to shift particularly during the segment when the kids are drifting down the river.
When I was in junior high school, Night of the Living Dead was scheduled to play on TV (Creature Features) one night. I’d heard that it was the scariest movie ever, so I decided to watch it. When the night came around, my parents had something they wanted to watch on the TV in the family room, so I had to go back to their bedroom. Alone. I started watching, and I was scared just by the movie’s reputation. I watched the first scene in the cemetery (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara.....look! there’s one now!”). When the first zombie attacks Barbara, I decided I was going to be too tired to watch the rest.
So I didn’t see Night of the Living Dead until after I’d fallen in love with Dawn of the Dead.
The laserdisc starts with a joke about the poor quality of previous tape versions of the movie. The picture looks really grainy and the soundtrack sounds warped. Just as you’re ready to swear about the ripoff, a crystal clear Elite Entertainment logo appears with full bodied sound. Then the movie starts again, in glorious black and white.
The disc has two commentary tracks, one by the director George Romero and the other by the cast. Both have some interesting things to say, although it sounds more like a fun reunion that a serious look at the movie.
This tape collects all of the Nine Inch Nails videos up to The Downward Spiral, plus a documentary about the tour. I bought it because I love the video for "Closer" and wanted to see the unedited version, and also wanted to see the famous video wherein Bob Flanagan (the "supermasochist" featured in the movie Sick) gets eaten by a machine.
The videos are all very good if you like that kind of ominous, paranoid thing.
Werner Herzog's remake of the classic Murnau silent film version of Dracula features a stunning and unforgettable series of images. The trip to Dracula's castle, Klaus Kinski's makeup and studied movements, Renfield's laugh, the ghost ship drifting silently into its berth, the white rats pouring across the wharf, the abandoned town square during the plague... almost every scene is a visual feast.
This film was the first since It Happened One Night to sweep the top five Academy Awards—Best Picture, Best Director (Milos Forman), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), and Best Screenplay. Watching it, you’ll be surprised by the number of actors you recognize in small roles. Even if you’ve seen the movie before, you’ll say at least once, “He was in this movie?!” You’ll also be impressed by the debut of Brad Dourif in the critical role of Billy Bibbitt.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the first production effort from Michael Douglas. His father Kirk owned the rights for many years before Michael finally got the movie made.
Have you ever wondered what all the fuss was about with Marlon Brando? Me too. His performance in On The Waterfront explains why people were so excited by him as an actor. He plays a dumb, inarticulate character, but he’s able to convey what he’s thinking without saying it.
Three words: Chief Dan George. Three more: Endeavor to perservere.
The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood's best Western. It has everything you could want in a movie: epic scope, action, comedy, characters, and heart. If you haven't seen it, go rent a copy.
Pale Rider is an underrated Clint Eastwood outing. I have it on disc only because it came in a box set with The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven. The story is typical of Eastwood westerns, but the cinematography is beautiful and I love the casting of Carrie Snodgrass. She looks like a frontier woman.
Evelyn always has to leave the room during the embarrassing scene where the young girl proclaims her love for Clint’s character.
A one-of-a-kind movie experience. This film has something to shock or offend pretty much anyone.
I have a personal memory related to this movie. When I was in high school, I was visiting my dad and stepmother, who, unlike us, had a VCR. I’d heard of Pink Flamingos, but didn’t know a lot about it. I talked my dad into renting it, and we all watched it together that evening. None of us ever forgot it.
The Criterion Collection laserdisc has a pretty good commentary track from John Waters. In addition to being funny, he does a good job of putting the movie into the context of its time. I was surprised when he pointed out all the Charles Manson references in the movie, which I never noticed. The disc also has some deleted scenes, which are okay but don’t really add much.
American Movie Classics had a 30th anniversary Planet of the Apes marathon. I have all five movies in letterbox format, plus a two-hour documentary about the making of the films. I think they are classic B movies.
The first film, The Planet of the Apes, is clearly the best of the series, featuring a quintessential Charlton Heston performance and one of the most famous surprise endings in movie history.
The second film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, is possibly the worst of the series, in competition with Battle for the Planet of the Apes. It features telepathic human mutants who alternately remind me of the Family from The Omega Man (another Charlton Heston classic) and the aliens from the Star Trek episode where they throw around the dwarf Michael Dunn and make Kirk kiss Uhura.
The series gets back on track with the third film, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Starting with this film, the apes become the heroes rather than the humans. Escape is one of the best films in the series partly because of a charismatic performance from Kim Hunter.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is my choice for second best film in the series. It is the most intense of the films; in fact, it was controversial when it came out because it was so dark and violent—people thought of the Apes movies as family entertainment.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes was consciously made as a live-action cartoon suitable for children. It requires a much higher suspension of disbelief than the rest. For example, it takes place during the same generation as Conquest, but suddenly the apes are talking—and so are the humans. This turn of events doesn't match the history described in the original Planet of the Apes. This last film also suffered from a very low budget.
I like how the series forms a cycle, with the events from the later movies feeding back to the beginning of the first. I also think it's interesting that these movies, viewed as family entertainment, all have downbeat endings. Hollywood would never go for that today.
The most frustrating thing about living in the suburbs is my lack of access to quality video rental stores. When I want to see an offbeat film like Poison, I’m out of luck. In some cases, such as this film and The Apu Trilogy, it’s easier for me to find a copy to buy than a copy to rent. I bought Poison at Borders here in Pleasanton.
Poison was the first film by Todd Haynes, the director of one of my favorite movies Safe. It’s an experimental film that intercuts three stories told in different styles. One story involves a man who discovers a liquid form of the human sex drive, told in the style of a 1950s horror movie. Another is a pseudodocumentary about a boy who disappeared, apparently flying away. The third is a melodramatic love story about two men in prison.
It’s an interesting film, obviously the product of a talented filmmaker, but it doesn't quite hang together for me. It seems like Haynes is trying to show different aspects of the gay experience, but I'm not sure. When I watch, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether the different stories are supposed to be commenting on each other. Why does he switch from one story to the other at the places he does? It seems like there must be a reason he didn't just present the stories in linear order.
Polyester is the transitional film between John Waters’ early low-budget flicks—Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Female Trouble—and his mainstream films—Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom. It starts Divine and an actual movie star, Tab Hunter. It is the story of Francine Fishpaw, a suburban housewife who has to put up with all manner of indignity (delinquent children, cheating husband, evil mother, and on and on) until she has a dream romance with the sensitive hunk Tab Hunter.
I think Polyester may be John Waters’ funniest movie, even if Pink Flamingos is more of a classic. I particularly like the section where Divine’s daughter is pregnant. First she gives a cutting speech about how horrible it is to have a baby inside her. Then, when Divine calls the house for unwed mothers, two nuns come rushing up to the house making the sign of the cross, kidnap the daughter, and throw her in the truck of their car. The scenes at the unwed mothers’ home are hilariously ominous, including a forced hayride in a rainstorm.
Polyester was filmed in Odorama, meaning that it originally came with a scratch-and-sniff card. Unfortunately, I ordered the disc too late to get a card. But it does have a commentary track from John Waters, a documentary about co-star Edith Massey, and a variety of information about Waters’ Baltimore cronies.
Pulp Fiction is one of those movies I like better every time I see it. The dialogue is just so great.
This film came out around the time I became a serious moviegoer. At the time, though, I thought Ordinary People was a better film. I remember thinking Robert DeNiro’s performance was amazing, but I didn’t see the point of the story.
In my opinion, Raging Bull is about struggling to deal with your limitations. The key scene, thematically, is the one where Jake talks to his brother about how small his hands are, and how he’ll never have a chance to fight Joe Louis, the best in the world.
A live-action cartoon from the Coen brothers. There are funny performances from Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, but what I remember best is the cartoon-based cinematography, like the tracking shots following crawling babies.
This film engages me intellectually even though its tone is kind of flat emotionally and it’s not all that well acted. I think you should be able to tell a lot about a person by how they react to the ending. Did she make the right decision or not?
The way this film engages me reminds me of a couple of others: The Music of Chance and Safe. The three films are not at all similar, but they put my brain into the same sort of intellectually engaged trance.
Reanimator is a funny movie, with its over-the-top acting and cheap but gruesome special effects. But its true greatness is the final scene where the dean “gives head” to the young heroine. Few movies would be willing to go as far as this.
The laserdisc includes a number of scenes that were deleted from the original release, but which we reinserted in the R rated videotape version. (To get an R rating, they needed to cut so much that they had to add other scenes—without the director’s approval.) The extra scenes add a whole new subplot involving the dean’s hypnotic powers. It’s interesting to see how different a movie can be with just a few changes.
The disc has two commentary tracks, one from the cast and one from the director, Stuart Gordon. Gordon’s commentary has some interesting stuff in it, but he doesn’t seem to realize the movie is funny. For example, he keeps talking about Jeffrey Coomb’s incredible performance as Herbert West as if it’s great acting, but the beauty of it is how bad it is.
To me, the most interesting aspect of Quentin Tarantino's first film is that it is a heist movie in which the heist is never shown. The first scene takes place before the heist and the rest of the movie takes place after it. Looking back from the vantage point of subsequent Tarantino films (like Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown), we can see that fractured timelines are part of his directorial style.
The first scene, which takes place in a restaurant, also establishes a key part of the Taratino style: clever, funny dialogue laced with pop-culture references. One character, played by Tarantino himself, expounds his theory of what Madonna's song "Like A Virgin" really means. Another (Steve Buscemi) explains why you shouldn't tip waitresses in coffee shops.
In my opinion, Return of the Living Dead is the best movie ever at balancing humor and horror. It’s got some hilarious scenes that are also horrifying. Evelyn and I routinely quote lines from this movie, our favorite being, “You mean the movie lied?”
Safe is my favorite film of the 1990s. I love everything about it, from its dead-on presentation of life in the San Fernando Valley to its quietly horrific theme. Julianne Moore gives a great performance as a woman who has everything but can't take control of her life. Slowly she succumbs to "environmental illness," a kind of allergic reaction to the world around her. Or does she? Her doctor and husband think it might be psychosomatic.
Todd Haynes, the writer and director, doesn’t tip his hand about whether the main character is physically sick or psychologically sick. You can find compelling evidence for either point of view. There's probably some truth to both.
In the end, I would call Safe a horror movie. The predicament that Julianne finds herself in is horrible any way you look at it, and it just keeps getting worse. The retreat she goes to has a creepy cult quality to it. And although at first they seem to be the only people who believe she is really sick, the guru of the place does end up suggesting that the source of the illness is a psychological failure. She can't escape the belief that her illness is her fault.
This documentary about Bible salesmen captures the world of sales better than anything I've ever seen. Most importantly, it accurately conveys the inner conflict caused by the salesman's belief that success or failure is based on entirely on personal qualities of the salesman himself. In other words, if you aren't making sales, it's your fault: you're not trying hard enough or you're too soft or you're just not a good salesman. One of the men featured in this documentary is going through a tough time, and you can see the mixture of pity and contempt in the eyes of his friends and coworkers.
After my brief career as an insurance salesman, I find this great film both painful and cathartic to watch.
All too commonly, I’m watching an action movie and I find I can’t figure out where anything is—where was the hero when the bridge blew up? How did he get from here to there? Whenever I have this experience, I think of Seven Samurai. This film has some complex battle sequences, involving action at four sides of a village with hundreds of people, and I always know who is where, what the strategies are, and so on.
We saw the documentary Sound and Fury at the San Francisco Film Festival in April 2000. I found myself thinking about it and the issues it raises long after I left the theater. That's the mark of a great movie.
The basic subject might sound kind of dull. Peter and Nita Artinian are a deaf couple with a deaf daughter. As the film begins, they are trying to decide whether to give their daughter Heather a cochlear implant, a new surgical procedure that would enable her to hear. Seems like an easy decision, doesn't it? Well sure it does, but only because you are thinking of deafness as a diability. If, like the Artinians, you think of deafness as a cultural distinction and not a diability, the decision is not so easy. It becomes the age-old question of assimilation versus cultural identity, the same dilemma faced by any minority group. So is deafness a diability or merely a personal difference like skin color? Is the deaf community any different from other cultural communities? Are deaf people better off staying within their own communities or working to assimilate into the larger society that is prejudiced against them?
The issues raised by the situation are surprisingly knotty, but what gives the film its power is the intense feelings the questions arouse in this one family. The Artinian's extended family manages to embody all possible points of view. Peter's parents are hearing (and in favor of an implant for Heather); Nita's parents are deaf (and opposed to it). Peter's brother is hearing but recently had a deaf son (and plans to give him the implant). There are class differences between the families: do they affect their feelings about the issue? No talking heads in this documentary, just strong feelings and strong words between family members.
I bet most people would find this three-hour Russian science fiction film slow, tedious, and overly intellectual. Not me, though. I love it; I find it beautiful, inspirational, and thought provoking. Andrei Tarkovsky is the director.
The story involves a place called the Zone. Something happened in the Zone to make it uninhabitable. In the center of the Zone is a room where, it is said, your deepest desires come true. Naturally people want to get to this room. However, the government guards the Zone against intruders, plus legend has it that traps await you along the way to the room. To get there, you have to hire a stalker, a person who knows how to navigate the Zone.
In Stalker, a stalker leads two men (called simply The Writer and The Scientist) through the Zone. Along the way, they have didactic conversations about what it means to be human, whether we really know our deepest desires, and so on.
Although the film quality is bad, I find the images in this film mesmerizing. The deliberate pacing provides a meditative mood. And every few minutes, one of the characters introduces a fascinating new idea.
The best of the Star Trek movies for two reasons: (a) it’s got a battle of wits between Kirk and the captain of another starship in a dogfight, and (b) Ricardo Montalban as Khan. Montalban has great fun overacting as the villian, thrusting his bare chest out and declaiming his lines like he was in a Shakespeare play. We all know the villian makes the movie.
Kirk: You haven’t killed me, Khan.
Khan: I’ve done worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on ..... hurting you.
A well-made concert film from Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues tour. Two things separate it from the typical concert film. First, the show itself had a sort of narrative arc to it: Starting with a bare stage, the members of Talking Heads come out one at a time, playing a song before bringing on the next person. Second, director Jonathan Demme focuses on the performance, not the crowd. I guess the fact that I love Talking Heads music has an effect too.
The stupidest movie I ever loved. Strange Brew stars the Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug Mackenzie, the beer-loving Canadians they played on SCTV. They go to a brewery trying to get free beer and stumble on a plot to control the world, masterminded by the evil brewmaster Max Von Sydow. (What the heck is Ingmar Bergman’s favorite actor doing in this movie?)
The plot is very silly, as are most of the jokes, but the Mackenzie brothers are just so lovable! Their brotherly comraderie makes the movie fun.
This film was a revelation to me when I first saw it. It wasn’t like anything I’d seen before: the long blackouts between scenes, the single camera shot in each scene, the deadpan actors who almost never moved. I found this laserdisc in a cutout bin at Camelot for $9.50, and I had to buy it.
Although I still like the film, I don’t think it has stood the test of time as a unique classic. Too many subsequent films have imitated its style.
To tell the truth, I didn't have high expectations going in to this film. Sure, it's Kurosawa, but it's early Kurosawa, and the liner notes on the laserdisc I borrowed were filled with qualifications like "Kurosawa didn't care for it" and "a master finding his voice." But except for some sequences that could have been tightened up in the editing room (like when Mifune walked the streets as a down-and-out veteran), it's great.
I love how we get to see all varieties of post-war Japanese life, from the poverty to the nightclubs to the baseball game. I was intrigued by the central thematic question of why, in nearly identical circumstances, Mifune became a cop while his nemesis became a criminal. The relationship between the two cops was interesting, because of their different styles and their different generations (with Mifune being part of the apres guerre generation). Of course, Takashi Shimura is fantastic as always. On top of all that, well-crafted genre filmmaking.
This tape collects all of the music videos for Talking Heads. Between videos are interviews with people describing their dreams, shot in the style of David Byrne's one directorial effort, True Stories. These in-between segments provide a dreamlike mood, although they don't ultimately add up to anything.
Taxi Driver was the first laserdisc I bought, and it is still one of my favorites. The film is great and so is the commentary.
I love the film for several reasons. First of all, it’s a great example of a movie that makes you identify with an unpleasant character. But I love the way that he tries to overcome his isolation and enter mainstream society through his relationship with Cybil Shepherd.
The commentary gives good insights into the making of this film, the filmmaking process in general, and Martin Scorcese. For example, in the final, violent section, Scorsese uses a different film stock, one that looks grainier. He talks about how he chose to film it that way to reduce the shockingness of the violence. Several years later, Criterion issued a laserdisc of Menace 2 Society, directed by the Hughes brothers. When asked how they learned filmmaking since they did not attend film school, they said they learned everything they needed to know from Scorcese's Taxi Driver commentary track!
The commentary track on this disc is surprisingly informative, both about the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (sic) itself and about making low-budget movies. (The title as shown in the credits has “chain saw” as two words.) The cinematographer had some good technical information to impart, and Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, is funny. I was particularly interested to learn that the whole cast and crew hated the guy who played Franklin, the annoying guy in the wheelchair, because he stayed in character throughout filming.
For Christmas 2006, I received The Complete Thin Man Collection: all six Thin Man films plus a pair of documentaries about William Powell and Myrna Loy from Turner Classic Movies.
The Thin Man is a murder mystery based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. William Powell and Myrna Loy play Nick and Nora Charles, a former detective and his socialite wife who get involved in solving a murder. The Hammett novel is a typical straightforward mystery, but the joy of the film — and of its sequels — is Nick and Nora's relationship. Their banter and their obvious affection far outshine the mechanics of the plot. I forget whodunit almost instantly, but I'm left with great affection for the characters. (I also remember the prodigious amount of drinking they do.) Unfortunately, it is rare to see such positive marriages in the movies, especially movies from 1934. As Roger Ebert says in his review: "The movie is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir, and it does technically provide clues, suspects and a solution to a series of murders, but in tone and intent it's more like an all-dialogue version of an Astaire and Rogers musical, with elegant people in luxury hotel penthouses and no hint of the Depression anywhere in sight."
The title The Thin Man refers to the murdered man in the first film, but the phrase recurs in the titles of all the sequels. Thin Man movies follow a rigid formula: Nick and Nora meet an old acquaintance of Nick's who has a colorful name like Hacksaw and who "plays along" when Nick introduces Nora as his wife. They stumble onto a murder scene. Nick says he is retired and won't get involved, but Nora encourages him to take the case. After investigating, Nick gathers all the suspects in a room, English mystery style. He recaps the plot until the murderer reveals him- or herself. Nick and Nora begin to get affectionate, and their dog Asta covers his eyes with his paws. The End.
Watching the Thin Man movies is more like watching a TV show than a series of films. The standard plot is an excuse to spend time with your favorite characters. The movies were, in fact, the inspiration for the TV shows Hart to Hart and Moonlighting.
This film is hilarious, as everyone knows. What this laserdisc reveals is how different it could have been.
The disc contains two commentary tracks, one by Rob Reiner and the other by the members of the band. But the real revelation is the hour and a half of extra footage. They filmed a lot of scenes they didn’t end up using, including an entire subplot about an opening band and a lot a character development. If they’d released the three hour cut, we would have seen a movie with much more balance between humor and documentary elements. When I see all the extra footage, I wonder how the filmmakers could tell what they had in the cutting room. Didn’t the film seem choppy when you knew all that was cut?
I’m disappointed with where the side break occurs on this disc—right after the lowering of Stonehenge. It is one of the funniest moments in the film, and I find the side break disruptive. It’s my only complaint about this great disc.
I also have this film of DVD, with a different commentary track. This one is from the stars in character.
The best mountaineering film ever, in my opinion. The story is incredible, inspiring, and true. The mountaineering sequences are very realistic, with a nice mix of close detail (crampon and axe placement, rime-covered gear) and long shots to provide geographic context. But the thing that separates this film from the rest is how well it captures the distinct, prickly personalities of the climbers. Joe and Simon are not archetypes but real people, and their peculiarities come across, especially when you watch the film in conjunction with the strong extra features on the DVD.
This film spends a lot of time lingering over its special effects, but because of the way it uses music, it doesn’t seem as annoying or obvious as the self-congratulatory shots in the first Star Trek movie or Forbidden Planet.
My favorite scene is during the last segment, when the old Dave is sitting at the table eating. I love the care with which he wipes his mouth and puts down his napkin before going to check out the noise he heard. The slowness of it reflects the overall pace of the film.
I have the pilot episode/movie on laserdisc and DVD, the first season on DVD, and the rest of the series on videotape. The laserdisc includes the “European ending,” which was tacked on to provide a conclusion for European audiences who saw the film in a theater. The ending incorporates some of the “Mike and Bob” footage that appeared later in the series, but it’s a completely different—and completely unsatisfying—wrap-up of the story.
I remember watching the pilot episode when it first aired. I wasn't a huge David Lynch fan at the time, but I decided to watch. It amazed me; I couldn't talk about anything else the next day. As the series progressed, the soap-opera elements started to take over as it lost its distinctive tone. But every time I was about to give up on it, Lynch would come in to direct an episode and bring it all back.
This film won the Best Picture Oscar. I’m particularly impressed by the cinematography. In my opinion, the key moment is when the cowboys who slashed the prostitute come back to deliver the horses the sheriff ordered them to. They bring an extra horse with them for the prostitute. She has a forgiving look on her face, but the head madam refuses the horses, refuses to forgive the men, and sets the whole plot in motion.
Wages of Fear works well both as an action/adventure movie and as the kind of social commentary common in French movies. It tells the story of four men who volunteer to drive trucks full of nitroglycerin over rough roads. The film has many tense scenes where they need to get over or around obstacles without jostling the trucks.
My favorite moment occurs in a scene where the men encounter a boulder in the road. They can’t move it, so they take some of the explosive from their cargo and blow it up. When their plan succeeds, they celebrate by taking a piss on the boulder. Now there’s a manly way to celebrate!
Although Breathless is his most famous film, when I think of Jean Luc Godard, I think of Weekend. It is far more typical of his style than Breathless is: it has the directionless plot, the off-kilter cuts, the aimless dialogue, the socio-political digressions, the postmodern self-reflexive commentary.
Weekend is most famous for a set piece that occurs early in the film. A bickering couple sets out in their convertible for a weekend at her parents’ house. Almost immediately they get caught in a giant traffic jam. They cut into the opposite lane and begin passing the cars, and we see, in one long tracking shot, quite a variety of activity: people playing cards or soccer, repairing their cars, having a picnic, feeding the lions on the carnival trucks, and so on. They finally make it to the front of the line and pass a violent accident.
From that point the plot goes off in a direction you don’t expect. Suffice it to say that the accident at the front of the traffic jam is not the last burning car they see, and the story apparently takes place at some time in the future.
If you are interested in the history of film or the experiments of the French New Wave, you have to see Weekend.
This HBO series tells the parallel stories of the drug organization that controls West Baltimore and of the police investigation into their activities. Because it tracks a single story through its entire season, The Wire has time to show the details of real police work and to develop strong characters. The acting and writing are uniformly excellent, with each episode containing at least one revelatory moment.
I may have watched Young Frankenstein more than any other movie. When we first got cable when I was a kid, Young Frankenstein was on Showtime, and I watched it pretty much every time it was on. Some lines from it have made it into my everyday vocabulary. Whenever Evelyn and I seem to be slipping into meaningless phrases, I always say, “Taffetta, darling.” “Could be worse, could be raining” is another favorite. Evelyn loves it when Madelaine Kahn calls the creature “zipperneck.”